Adobe has issued its second release candidate of Flash Player 10, which should be approaching the finish line. Developers have not only fixed a number of bugs, but added a few new features.

Among these new features is the ability to use graphical filters and effects in Adobe’s native Pixel Bender programming language for interactive 3D animation. The text layout engine provides new controls such as ligatures and right-to-left and vertical text rendering. Flash Player 10 integrates with the monitor’s ICC color management so that color graphics appear as developers intend them.

Adobe also streamlined performance. Visual processing tasks are now moved to the video card to unburden the CPU. New audio and video features promise an improved rich media content presentation, especially when combined with Adobe’s upcoming Flash Media Server. The Dynamic Streaming functionality should serve to make videos playable uninterrupted and in the best quality, independent of the current bandwidth. Adobe’s new UDP-based Real Time Media Flow Protocol (RTMFP) should help transfer data more efficiently and securely. The integrated Speex audio codec is a viable alternative to the commercially available Nellymoser Asao codec for low latency audio.

Adobe plans to follow up with support in Flash Play 10 for Video4Linux v2 (V4L2), Mozilla’s Network Security Services (NSS), Linux WMODE (transparent and opaque windowless mode), large bitmaps up to 4096x4096 pixels, and limited full screen keyboard access.

Related content

Adobe’s beta version of Flash Player 9 for Linux looks quite mature. Is it worth upgrading right now? This article looks into installing Flash Player 9 beta, and integrating a video camera and a microphone.

Adobe Systems has issued a prerelease version of project Alchemy, a small tool that compiles C and C++ code for programs running on ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM2). The idea is to expand the capabilities of Web applications running on Adobe Flash Player 10 and Adobe AIR 1.5.

Comments

Overlapping menus

I get around this by running Aardvark in Firefox and removing the offending flash item frrm the page.
It's a workaround, not a solution, but at least it's simple and effective.

Overlapping on drop-down menus

Joshua

If I am not mistaken, using WMODE should correct the issue you mentioned about the drop-down menus, however, not all sites make use of it when they need to.

Maybe they fixed the overlapping issues in the Linux version this time?

joe.attaboy

I have yet to see any mention made of fixing the annoying "overlap" issue with Adobe Flash on Linux. This is the annoyance that occurs when Flash content is placed near things like drop-down/fly-out menus on the page. The user clicks on or hovers over the menu, but the menu drops behind the Flash content box, rendering the menu useless.

Fix that, and I'll be relatively happy.

Swamping Process

Dave T

Absolutely agreed about the performanc, it is e but they can't use x to accelerate the video as it is YUV rather than RGB (I have no idea why and I don't htink they do). That said they can't be the brightest as they were complaining about the sound architecture in Linux whilst coding for OSS rather than ALSA like everyone else did (apart from a few proprietary projects, why proprietary projects use legacy tools is beyond me as lond as they are satisfying the top three distributions the rest will have to follow suit).

Still horrible performance

Author

Why does Adobe flash use 3-5 times the CPU resources to play the content compared to open source media players (like mplayer)? The open source guys have to reverse engineer a lot of functionality, and yet, they do so much better playing the content Adobe creates. Try it yourself - pass mplayer the URL of the flv and compare the CPU utilization. Adobe needs to embrace open source, both as a philosophy and as a coding practice. Let those experts in coding these type of applications help you make your (free) player competitive. After all, you are making your money on the content creation, not the browser plugin.